1

Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

Schema Growth: Testing the Effects of Novel Stimuli on Schemata

Melanie Sharif

Binghamton University
 2
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

Abstract

Although schemas have been utilized for a range of purposes in psychological research, little

data have been collected on schemata from a cognitive science perspective. While schemas seem

to offer an easy method of organizing past experiences, little is known about their role in

understanding novel stimuli, or learning that may challenge the organizational structures of

previous information. This study aims to add to this body of knowledge by experimentally

testing the flexibility of established schemas to new, challenging information. This can be done

by measuring schema-intensity, or schema presence, in participants and subsequently observing

the effect the schema has on an integration of novel information in participants using a series of

cognitive tests. Results will suggest how robust of an effect schemas have on the integration of

new information into the brain and shed some light on their role in categorization processes.
 3
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

Schema Growth: Testing the Flexibility of Schemata to New Information

Although widely interpreted for experimental purposes in various fields of psychological

research, schemas can be generally defined as “active [organizations] of past reactions, or of past

experiences, which must always…[operate] in any well-adapted organic response" (Bartlett 3).

Schemas can be considered as specific impressions or collections of related information in the

brain that both reflect past experiences and can be utilized in interpreting potential future

experiences. In this light, schemas as they exist in individuals can be seen essentially seen as

uniquely formed “concepts” that are always available for individual use and always subject to

revision. Past research on schemata has included analyzing schemas as “scripts” for sexual

experiences (Hall, Morales, Coyne-Beasley, St. Lawrence, 2012), using schemas as a measure of

emotional-state analysis (Lobbestael, Arntz, 2012), predicting suicidality and psychosis (Pratt,

Gooding, Johnson, Taylor, Tarrier, 2010), as well as measuring maladaptive thought patterns that

may lead to things like personality disorders and insecure attachment (Schmidt, Joiner, Young,

Telch, 1995; Tsachi, Mikulincer, Shaver, 2011). While this body of work constitutes a wide

range of uses for schemas, previous research has focused primarily on the implications of

schema analysis for clinical and social psychology, and little research has focused on schemata

from a cognitive perspective. However, experimentally analyzing schemas from such a

perspective could offer a wide range of benefits to the psychological community, as such

research would attempt to define schemata as they generally function.

This study in particular seeks to define schemata in terms of their influence over

categorization processes. While it can be seen as cognitively efficient for schemas to group
 4
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

related impressions of ideas in individuals, forming a kind of “fall back” response in the face of

new and potentially contradictory information that needs categorizing, it may be that their

influence is in part reflexive and lacks a certain elasticity required to fully incorporate novel

stimuli into understanding. A larger body of knowledge needs to be obtained on the influence of

schemata in novel situations to more fully understand their role in organizing past information.

This study aims to add to the cognitive knowledge on schemas by testing the flexibility of

established schemas in individuals to new information. This can be accomplished by creating a

series of cognitive tasks that will measure the intensity of a specific “concept” schema in an

individual and subsequently observe the integration or integration failure of novel information

into the schema. Tasks will be experimentally designed to measure the presence and “grade” of

certain emotionally-neutral schema, such as “shapes,” in individuals to rule out the possibility of

participant-bias in interpreting new stimuli. Novel stimuli presented will seek to represent

information that is related to the schema or concept in question but is not explicitly included in it,

such as a novel “shape-word” for the established conceptual schema of “shapes.” Such measures

would reflect the robustness of a “schematic response,” or the unwillingness to incorporate novel

stimuli into a schema solely due to its unfamiliarity, with the expected outcome being an

association between schema-intensity or presence and the schematic response. Results would

suggest the strength of schematic influence in interpreting novel situations.

Methods
Participants

Participants will be recruited through probability sampling, as to ascertain

generalizability. Fifty to sixty participants will be recruited through the Binghamton University
 5
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

Department of Psychology Subject Pool (n=60). Participants will be compensated either

monetarily or with class credit. During recruiting, participants should not be made aware of the

study’s explicit contents and should be told only that the study contains a knowledge test.

Research Design

The study will use a within-subjects design with an independent variable of

schema-intensity and a dependent variable of schema-growth, with schema-intensity meaning the

scale at which the individual identifies with the given schema and schema-growth meaning the

scale at which the schema was altered in the individual to accept the new and challenging

information. It should be noted that although “schema-intensity” is not measuring the explicit

presence or absence of the schema in participants, it is a suitable variable from which to observe

the targeted effect, as an explicit absence of the given schemata would just result in a very

low-scale rating for schema-intensity and would not affect results. Only one group of participants

will be necessary as all individuals will be tested for the same two variables only.

Materials

The study will be administered by a proctor in an isolated setting and should be

double-blind as to prevent the possibility of the proctor meaningfully modifying the ideas of the

participant.

Procedure

Both participants and study-administrators should not be explicitly made aware of the

study’s contents before beginning as to maintain a non-biased result. All study participants

should be informed only that they will be tested on their knowledge of a specific neutral topic
 6
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

like “shapes.” If participants or administrators are aware of the expanse of the study, it is

possible they will work to obtain the “right” answer and skew results. Participants should give

consent to having their responses recorded via digital recording methods before beginning and

proctors are required to gain full informed consent from all participants before the experiment

starts.

Participants will be required to complete a series of cognitive tasks. They will start with a

warm up task to familiarize themselves with the demands of the experiment, one that mirrors the

Animal Category Fluency Task (ACF) used in a previous study done by Pratt and colleagues

(2010). This test will require participants to list as many words matching the category of “fruit”

as they can in 60 seconds, with responses being recorded in the same order that they are given

and a final score being generated that removes category-irrelevant responses. Participants will

speak their answers aloud with the administrator digitally recording the participant’s responses to

be analyzed after the study is completed.

The next test required of study participants will be designed to measure the intensity of

the “shape” schema in each individual. Similar to the Suicide Category Sort Task (SCF) used in

the same study by Pratt and colleagues (2010) that utilized the ACF, participants will be given a

list of 100 words which need to be analyzed for “shape” concept relevance. Participants are then

to select 20 words from the list that they consider the most relevant toward the concept of

“shapes.” A few examples of words to choose from are “rectangle,” “area,” “triangle,”

“geometry,” etc. Just like in the SCF, words used in this test will be selected for the study by

experimenters from various psychological literature prior to the experiment to represent the

concept of “shapes.” The list of words selected will then need to be rated by 10-15 volunteers
 7
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

that will not participate in the study for “shape” concept relevance. A rating system of 0-3 should

be utilized, with 0 meaning the concept word is not related to “shapes” at all and 3 meaning the

word is closely related to “shapes.” The average ratings for each word will be calculated and

used to asses the centrality of each word to the concept of “shapes” and subsequently analyze the

intensity of the “shape” schema in participants. Participants will receive an experimental score

for their schema-intensity based on the concept relevance rating of the words they choose.

The last test required of participants will be to answer a list of “Yes” or “No” questions

about whether a list of new words and items should be considered shapes. It should be clear here

that participants are not being asked whether or not these novel words are “relevant to shapes” as

they were in the first task, but rather whether or not the novel stimulus is a “shape-word” and

should be considered a shape. The difference between the “shape concept” and “shape-words”

here is robust enough to accurately measure the flexibility of the “shape” schemata as individuals

are now being explicitly asked to incorporate new information into their schema, whereas before

they were just reflecting on their existing schematic knowledge. Although even a novel

“shape-word” may have an average rating for “shape concept relevance,” participants will be

required to answer only either “Yes” or “No,” creating an explicit boundary of where the schema

begins and ends. Ten words or items not listed in any previous test will be presented as

questions, with words like “triacontakaidigon” (meaning 32-sided polygon) being included.

Some questions may include a brief background given by the proctor, such as, “Say you

encountered a perfectly circular animal. Is this a shape?” or “The universe begins wherever you

are and ends farther than you can see in the sky. Does the universe have a shape, even if we don’t

know what kind it is?” To control for any learning that may occur during this test, brief
 8
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

definitions or clarifications can be offered to participants for each question they are required to

answer but with their number of questions they ask being recorded. Participants will receive a

score on this test based on how many words they answer “Yes” to.

Results

A Pearson’s correlation will need to be calculated to analyze the relationship between

schema-intensity scores and schema-growth scores. It is expected that higher schema-intensity

scores will be correlated with lower schema-growth scores, implicating that the more

concentrated the presence of the schema is in the individual, the less likely it is to be receptive to

new and technically correct, but not previously learned, information. A partial correlation or

regression should be calculated with the number of questions asked by participants in the third

task, or the “rate of learning,” to account for any learning that may have been done by

participants over the course of the experiment.

Discussion

Expected results to this study are a significant relationship between schema-intensity

scores and schema-growth scores. It is expected that as schema-intensity scores increase,

schema-growth scores decrease, indicating an inverse relationship between the two. It is also

expected that the “rate of learning” regression will have no significant relationship with either

variable, although it is possible it may be significantly associated with high schema-growth

scores, indicating that schema-expansion is not possible without an active effort on the part of

the individual to understand new information.

This study aims to be generalizable but may not be due to persisting sampling bias or bias

in participants with respect to completing the task “correctly.”

 9
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

It should be noted that it is important for this study to remain emotionally neutral, as

schemas have been used in the past to assess psychological phenomena that are clinical in nature.

This study is not meant to comment on clinical interpretations of schema, as they will involve

suggestions of treatment for changing maladaptive schemas. Rather, this study aims to present

schema from a neutral perspective and establish whether or not they are a generally reliable

method of interpreting novel situations and integrating knowledge.

It is possible that the expected result, an inverse association between schema-intensity

and schema-growth, may not be found. In this case, it is possible that the detrimental influence of

schemas on new information is indeed present, but the operationalization of measuring and

testing the bounds of schemas were not strong enough. While the need for the study to remain

emotionally-neutral limits the choices this study has in analyzing existing schemas in

individuals, there may certainly be concepts other than “shapes” that are both non-emotionally

threatening and robust enough to resist challenging novel stimuli.

If found, the expected results of this study would have wide-reaching implications, as

they would open up an avenue for schema-research which establishes them as imperfect

adaptations. From a cognitive perspective, schemas allow for the stream-lining of information

storage and use in the brain, but they may be imperfect in that they short-change novel stimuli by

relying on previously established impressions of similar stimuli that may not always be totally

accurate. It is possible that categorization and the interpretation of novel information as

influenced by schemas is a largely reflexive reaction in individuals with limited potential for the

integration of new information, and this study could open the doors for studying further details
 10
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

about the relationship between novel stimuli and schemata as well as the cognitive structure of

schemata.
 11
Running head: SCHEMA GROWTH

References 
 

Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. London: Cambridge University Press. 

Hall, N. M., Morales, D.A., Coyne-Beasley, T., St. Lawrence, J. (2012). Correlates of African- 

American men’s sexual schemas.​ Sex Roles,​ ​67(​ 11), 670-681.  

Lobbestael, J., Arntz, A. (2012). The state dependency of cognitive schemas in antisocial  

patients. ​Psychiatry Research,​ ​198(​ 3), 452-456.  

Pratt, D., Gooding, P., Johnson, J., Taylor, P., Tarrier, N. (2010). Suicide schemas in non- 

affective psychosis: An empirical investigation.​ Behavior Research and Therapy,​ ​48​(12), 

1211-1220.  

Schmidt, N. B., Joiner, T. E., Young, J. E., Telch, M. J. (1995). The schema questionnaire:  

investigation of psychometric properties and the hierarchical structure of a measure of 

maladaptive schemas. ​Cognitive Therapy and Research,​ ​19(​ 3), 295-321.  

Tsachi, E., Mikulincer, M., Shaver, P.R. (2011). Attachment insecurities and the processing of  

threat-related information: Studying the schemas involved in insecure people’s coping strategies. 

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,​ ​101(​ 1), 78-93.